The brain may actively forget during REM sleep
nih.gov
nih.gov
It's exploitable, too. Health concerns aside, it seems like if someone needs to crack some really hard problem, then they might:
1. Prepare by deep sleeping until the mind's a blank slate.
2. Start working on the problem while avoiding deep sleep (to avoid wipes) and extraneous information (to avoid junk that'd force you to get sleep).
3. Upon completing the problem, thoroughly document (the mental copy's about to get shredded), then sleep it off.
"Oh, heh, cute that scientists need to confirm what's clearly obvious to me." Often with an anecdote about how they've always known it, and with an explanation about how it works (obviously) which you think would be unnecessary if it was such common knowledge.
It is pretty common to explain sleep as when your mind cleans up and store stuff in long term memory. From there it is largely a point of view distinction between “keeping stuff you want to save” and “throwing away stuff you don’t want to save”
When we realize it's not common knowledge, we get excited and/or become proud of ourselves, and explain what we think to indulge ourselves (because we were just given evidence that the knowledge isn't as common as we thought).
I think it depends on the problem being solved.
If it's a separable problem, then we can attack it like we code up object-oriented programs: this is, we come up with an overall design, break it into pieces, then do those pieces individually. Separating the logic like this vastly reduces the complexity of the problem space.
But, I hear that before object-oriented programming and such, programmers used to make really confusing programs in Assembly, relying on unstated assumptions about what states the program could enter, leveraging `goto` statements in ways that'd get people fired today, etc..
I think that if you're able to attack a problem using separable logic, e.g. object-oriented design, then you can fairly readily complete a smaller part of it, then go to sleep. Sleeping'll help reset the mind, but still leave enough information about how the coded parts work to continue later.
But if you're working on certifiable abomination of Assembly where the program logic is critically dependent upon all sorts of ideas you have in your head, then you've really gotta finish programming it in one shot -- if you sleep, then you'll forget that the `int` that shouldn't ever be `10` can be `10` in one particular edge case, then everything else will break in a way that no one could ever untangle.
I think the core quality that makes some problems hard is not knowing a way to break them down, because they're these huge, floating monstrosities where every little thing is inexorably dependent upon every other little thing, much as in that Assembly-programming paradigm.
It's in those cases that skipping a good-night's sleep can make sense. That said, I completely agree that breaking a problem down into parts is great whenever possible.
On the other hand we might ask, is three 8 hour days better than six 4 hour days? What if there are break days in between the 8 hour days? Maybe only the first night of sleep on a new program is particularly effective. Who knows.
Empirically I'd wager most of my coworkers had similar habits, although the people I believed had more overall mental capacity than me did seem to have a much quicker ramp up time on just about anything.
I wonder if MCH plays a role in memory impairment caused by frequent cannabis usage. It is also related to appetite enhancement, and I saw at least one study saying cannabinoids stimulate MCH. [1]
The REM connection is especially interesting - because as many long-term cannabis users will tell you, you usually stop dreaming after a while of use. If you stop again though, dreams often come back with a vengeance. Studies say this is due to REM impairment and then REM rebound after stopping [2]. I'm totally spit-balling, but it makes me wonder if it's possible the REM changes long-term stoners experience could be from your body trying to regulate a overload of MCH.
As a child I used to have chronic nightmares. It is pretty rare these days.
So if anything, this lack of dreams (and the return of mainly nightmares) either only affects some people, or it is simply a matter of not remembering the dreams. Or both.
A better metaphor is probably that the brain is normally run like a heavily overclocked CPU & with insufficient cooling, so it needs to be turned off frequently to cool down.
So "getting rid of the pause" wouldn't result in getting back time but in melting down the chip.
Probably any computer-based metaphor we come up with for sleep is going to be crap because brains are not similar to computers, and it is unclear how they work. We don't even know exactly why sleep is necessary.
Except that there are. For example dolphins and other sea based mammals who cannot breath underwater. They do so via sleeping half their brain then flipping over and sleeping the other half. This prevents them from drowning.
Going back to the computer analogy, I always thought it sleep more like a disk defrag rather than GC pause. However as other commenters have pointed out, the brain is so different to any computer we've built that any comparison to a computer methodology would quickly fall apart under even the slightest bit of scrutiny.
I wonder if might be sort of the opposite. A lot of animals have natural downtime built into their schedules. Some animals are active only in the day because they need light to do whatever. Other animals are active only at night so they can avoid predators.
Being active all the time is not necessarily better. Idleness may seem like something you want to avoid (if you think in terms of the modern mindset of maximizing productivity), but activity requires energy. Which means it requires food, which is limited.
So you really would only want the amount of activity that actually helps you survive. Anything else should be eliminated because all activity has a cost.
Also, a bit of a tangent: when it comes to movement, rest is important. Endurance comes from the muscles. Muscles store energy inside themselves (in the form of glycogen), and they recharge slowly, on the order of hours. So we are a bit like an electric car that can run for a while but then needs to sit on a charger for a long time. Anyway, the point is that periods of rest help us keep our muscular charge topped up to 100%, and I'd bet there are situations where having your full endurance available is advantageous.
I suppose bodies could be built for faster muscle recharging, but that might make for a body that is more complicated or demands more resources to maintain. I'm not a biologist, but if I understand correctly, muscles draw energy from the bloodstream, and that energy can be supplied by the digestive system or by the liver converting fat. It's unlikely the digestive system could supply lots of energy fast, so you'd need a higher-throughput liver, which seems like a burden. It also might make it tricky to regulate blood sugar with things producing and consuming it at a high rate.
Point is, there might be advantages to a system where energy is staged near the final point of use in the muscles and can't be recharged all that quickly.
For instance, getting into the habit of introspecting your own thoughts the moment you realize you're awake -- you'll find that some of what seem like random things you're thinking about upon waking up are actually strands of whatever dream you were having in the last REM cycle before waking up, and if you practice pulling on those strands, you'll find that your recall improves over time.
There are also affirmations that can help. Literally telling yourself that you'll remember your dreams as you try and fall asleep, which implants a subconscious intent that helps create better recall.
I looked into this years ago when looking into inducing lucid dreams, and I can say from personal experience the various methods for getting more in touch with your dreams do work. It's just a question of whether you can be bothered to put in the effort and feel the reward is worth it.
and that's exactly why you miss out on nightly dreams!
(And when you find that each time you are about to reach a lavatory, it doesn't work for some crazy reason, wake up and actually go there)
Too.